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TESTAMENT's CHUCK BILLY Hopes To Release New Studio Album This Summer

Keith "Keefy" Chachkes of Ghost Cult magazine recently conducted an interview with vocalist Chuck Billy of San Francisco Bay Area metallers TESTAMENT. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

On the possibility of bringing back some songs from "Demonic" into the band's live set:

Chuck: "Well, that is what's next. And Gene [Hoglan; drums], he's, like, 'We should play some 'Demonic'!' But we just haven't. I imagine in the near future, next year when we have a new record, that is gonna be one of those records, we'll say, we haven't played anything live from in a while. I'd love to say, 'Let's pick out 'John Doe' or something like that.' Sometimes it's hard when you are not headlining and don't get as much time. Especially for this LAMB OF GOD tour, we have a forty-minute set time, so we can't really talk. How do we pick out six songs out of a hundred? We need to just hit it hard, and go."

On plans for a new studio album:

Chuck: "We start January 1st. We're gonna take the first three or four months off to write to start off the year, and then get the album out by summer. We're on a pretty good wave right now, so let's not slow down. So let's put together a new record and put ten new songs out there. Let's keep it going! When everybody gets off the road, everybody does there own thing, and does what they enjoy too. Then we all come back together to do TESTAMENT stuff, it makes it all that much more special. We're, like, 'Alright, we're all back together!' I'm really happy to have Gene around too. I have DUBLIN DEATH PATROL, which is a lot of fun for me. You know, everyone in the band is busy, and I wanted to be busy too! So I wanted to do a record. It started out as just a bunch of friends. Me and Zet (Steve 'Zetro' Souza, former EXODUS singer) have been friends for a long time. And the rest of the guys are just my friends and it was just for fun, but now we've gotten two records out of it."

On the "Dark Roots Of Earth" track "Native Blood", which is a battle cry of political activism for all indigenous Americans:

Chuck: "The message of the track totally came out exactly the way we wanted it. Up on the reservation where we shot it, it's actually kind of funny when I go back. Last week I was back on the reservation. I was there for a festival and I went up there, helped out, and introduced the band, hung out. It was trippy because I used to go to the reservation all the time, and didn't really have the acceptance. Now people are really recognizing me, and greeting me. People recognized me from the video, who would never really know about it from metal, like older people and grandmothers. It was cool! It was really rewarding for me that they got the message and dug the video. You didn't have to be a metal fan to get the meaning of the video. That's how I knew it worked."

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